VISI with Fondex SA

FONDEX SA is located at Cluses in an area called ‘Technical Valley’ in the French Alps. Fondex has over 50 years experience of the complete product manufacturing processes, offering their customers full support with their projects and a complete range of resources for stamping, deep drawing, machining, production and assembly operations.

The company has always been driven by the need to deliver customer satisfaction and, in 2000, when design offices began the mass migration to 3D tool design, it set out to find a tool to facilitate data exchange that would also enable them to capitalize on their know-how in the very specific fields of deep drawing and stamping.

"We can use VISI not only to make the tooling, but also to supply all the data we need for the machining, the tooling and the workshop. This is a difficult set of tasks that requires extensive capabilities and VISI meets this criteria on a daily basis. .”

Jean-Yves Betend, Technical Manager

Jean-Yves BETEND, technical and design manager, explains: “our customers are generally first-tier suppliers to the car industry, specialists in electrical connectors or manufacturers of capital goods. They come to us for our ability to analyse a part and define the right tool to produce it. By using VISI to manage their 3D data, we can produce a very precize solution. The parts are easier to visualize making it easier to detect any potential obstacles. We can then go straight to our customer with this information and discuss how the issues can be solved.

Ultimately we are able to respond much faster to market demands. We have saved 60% of our design time by eliminating the need to redraw. We can also automatically extract the net weight of the part and determine the gross weight of the rough stock, produce flat patterns, define the blank and use this information to define the band width and the pitch between tooling stations.”

Investing carefully to integrate corporate know-how Fondex are specialists in their field and were looking for an application that combined automation and flexibility and provided the complete freedom to select the best process plan to manufacture the part. After many software demonstrations and three separate supplier benchmark tests, the decision was made to choose VISI Progress for 3D tool design. As Jean-Yves BETEND emphasizes, “this know-how is our strength... We really appreciate the time we have saved by using the automatic flat pattern generation, but it is imperative for us to have complete control of the methods we use, for example, to determine the number of stations we need to construct the part.”

The company was looking to use only one software solution and was impressed by the seamless integration of the progressive die application and the modeller enabling the 3D model to be used as a basis for constructing the tooling and the strip schematic. Ultimately, it is the software’s ability to easily manage daily operations that really tipped the balance in favour of VISI.

“We realised that Vero had the team and the product to address the issues of flattened, folded or drawn parts and for the evaluation of blanks, which are basic problems for us” claimed BETEND. “It is reassuring to know that the software you are using is the finished article, but equally important is the high-quality technical support, especially when you are learning the software – it is easy to get lost in new controls”.

Fondex offers its customers a global service and a close working relationship with the tooling design office. A correspondent dedicated to the management of each customer’s project, creating the tooling, procurement and mechanical operations and ultimately the presentation of initial samples. So when an order comes in, we can use VISI not only to make the tooling, but also to supply all the data we need for the machining, the tooling and the workshop. This is a difficult set of tasks that requires extensive capabilities and VISI meets this criteria on a daily basis.

"We can use VISI not only to make the tooling, but also to supply all the data we need for the machining, the tooling and the workshop. This is a difficult set of tasks that requires extensive capabilities and VISI meets this criteria on a daily basis. .”